Amy Adams

"I don't intentionally try to find the scripts with unattractive characters, but I think that if a character is described in a script as heart-stoppingly beautiful, and there's nothing else said about her, it just doesn't hold a lot of interest for me." - Amy Adams

Ever since her acclaimed performance in Junebug -- for which the previously unknown Amy Adams was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar -- and her star-making turn in Enchanted, the bubbly ginger has been Hollywood’s go-to nice girl, a role she’s embraced wholeheartedly (until now). After Leap Year flopped at the box office, Adams role in The Fighter, David O. Russell’s boxing-movie-slash-awards-magnet, couldn’t have come at a more crucial time. As Mark Wahlberg’s rough-around-the-edges girlfriend, the role was Adams’ most searing, grittiest performance to date, and it earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Adams followed that performance up with another Oscar nominated role in 2012's The Master and kicked off 2013 playing Superman's leading lady, Lois Lane in Man Of Steel. Her most recent departure from the "good girl" image in American Hustle, has everyone, including the Academy, buzzing. She's already won the Golden Globe for Best Actress and is up for the Academy Award in the same category -- her fifth Oscar nomination to date. We're thinking this might be the year she bags it.

SEX APPEAL

There’s just no denying Amy Adams’ natural beauty. Her prominent features, childlike eyes, perfect porcelain skin and flowing, auburn tresses combine seamlessly to form that rarest of things: a movie star. But despite Adams’ camera-ready appearance, it never quite translated to white-hot sexiness -- the kind that’ll make you slap your mother for 10 more seconds of its presence. She just always seemed too, well, good. Not anymore. With her down-and-dirty performance as Mark Wahlberg’s tramp-stamped girlfriend in The Fighter (seeing her in a black bra and underpants was revelatory), Adams went from girl-next-door to girl-that-will-make-you-pick-up-your-jaw-from-off-the-floor just like that. Adams is clearly sticking with the bad girl image as she drove us absolutely crazy in American Hustle as Christian Bale's sexy, wild con-artist partner and girlfriend. We can't get Adams in those clingy, silky 70's wrap dresses out of our heads. She’s currently engaged to longtime boyfriend, actor and artist Darren Le Gallo, with whom she has a daughter.

SUCCESS

For an actress that struggled with her career for the majority of her 20s, Amy Adams sure has done well for herself. After her Oscar-nominated turn in the little-indie-that-could Junebug introduced her to the world, Adams was suddenly one of the most in-demand actresses in Hollywood, a status that only strengthened after she single-handedly carried Enchanted to box office gold. Before she knew it, Adams was starring alongside Hollywood legends Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts (Charlie Wilson’s War), Meryl Streep (Doubt, Julie & Julia), yukking it up with Will Ferrell (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Ben Stiller (Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian), and carrying films on her own (Sunshine Cleaning, Leap Year). Today, Adams finds herself among an elite group of actresses, nominated for her fifth Academy Award alongside the likes of Cate Blanchett, Meryl Streep, and Judi Dench.

In 2014, she won her second Golden Globe for her role in Big Eyes as Margaret Keane, the woman responsible for Walter Keane’s successful art career. And while she's playing Lois Lane to Henry Cavill's Superman in summer 2015, she'll get her own chance to save the world in 2016 as the lead in alien-encounter drama Story of Your Life. With all of Amy Adams' success, it's no surprise she ranked #30 in AskMen's list of Top 99 Outstanding Women of 2015.

Amy Adams Biography

Although Amy Adams was born in Italy, she grew up a typical U.S. army brat. Along with her four brothers and two sisters, Adams followed her father from base to base, before the family ultimately settled in Castle Rock, Colorado. Adams grew up around performers: her father a singer in restaurants and her mother a semi-professional bodybuilder. Raised a Mormon, she began singing in her high school choir and trained at a local dance company with dreams of becoming a ballerina. When Adams graduated from high school, her parents split up, and the precocious teenager decided not to go to college. Instead, she moved to Atlanta with her mother to pursue musical theatre. Adams’ first full-time job -- as a hostess, then waitress at a local Hooters -- still haunts her to this day, as journalists are quick to bring it up during interviews. The job itself only lasted three weeks, and Adams moved back to Colorado for her first paying theater job... dinner theater, that is. Her success took her to Minnesota in the 1990s to star in productions for the largest dinner theater in the country, where Adams caught the eye of Michael Nelson, a film producer, and landed her first Hollywood gig playing a cheerleader in the macabre beauty contest satire Drop Dead Gorgeous, which was being filmed nearby. Thanks to the urging of her costar Kirstie Alley, Adams decided to move to Hollywood, and the roles kept coming -- albeit small ones. First, Adams scored a role in the FOX television series Manchester Prep, which was killed early and turned into an unwatchable straight-to-video nightmare called Cruel Intentions 2. Adams continued to take on smaller roles in films like Psycho Beach Party, The Slaughter Rule and Pumpkin, waiting patiently for her big break.

Amy Adams Breaks Out In Junebug

Before landing Junebug, the role that would ultimately change Amy Adams’ life forever, she costarred alongside Leonardo DiCaprio in Steven Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can, a role that should have changed her life forever. Instead, not much changed after the film’s release, despite its box office success. Even Spielberg himself lamented that it should have been the film that made her a star. Instead, that honor went to Junebug, the sleeper independent film in which Adams played a Southern belle in crisis. The performance earned her a slew of awards, including the Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Actress, National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress and a Special Jury Prize at Sundance. But, most importantly, it earned Adams a coveted Oscar nomination.

Amy Adams Becomes A Superstar

After Junebug put her on the map, one thing was for certain: Amy Adams would never have to worry about getting work again. But the kind of work she was getting -- supporting roles in films like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny and Underdog -- failed to capitalize on the prodigious skills she showed off in Junebug. Then came Enchanted, the live-action musical fairy tale in which Adams played a Cinderella type from a 2-D imaginary world who was transplanted in New York City. Despite her Oscar nomination, Adams still had to beat 300 other actresses for the role. Kudos to the casting director -- Enchanted went on to earn $340 million worldwide, and Adams became an overnight sensation, even performing one of the film’s two nominated songs at the Oscars.

Amy Adams’ Star Continues To Rise

Amy Adams’ role in Enchanted launched her into an elite group of actresses, and the woman who was once ready to give up acting altogether suddenly found herself working with Hollywood’s best. In Charlie Wilson’s War, Adams costarred with Julia Roberts, Tom Hanks, and Philip Seymour Hoffman -- an actor she would work with again in Doubt, the religious drama in which Adams played a conflicted nun opposite Hoffman and one of her childhood idols, Meryl Streep. Adam’s bold performance earned her a second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress and sparked a friendship with Streep, with whom she would later costar in the Julia Child biopic, Julie & Julia.

Amy Adams Gives The Performance Of A Lifetime

Thanks to her performances in films like Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, Sunshine Cleaning and Leap Year, Amy Adams developed a reputation as one of the most versatile actresses in Hollywood. But despite her considerable range, Adams still managed to shock everyone with her visceral performance as the gritty girlfriend of boxer Micky Ward in David O. Russell’s The Fighter. The performance earned Adams a gamut of award nominations, including her third Oscar nomination. Quickly shifting gears, the multi-talented Adams starred alongside Jason Segel in the musical film The Muppets and then got back on the high road with a supporting role in the star-studded On the Road (2012). Her star power continued to rise after she landed the coveted role of Lois Lane alongside Henry Cavill in Zack Snyder's Superman remake, Man of Steel (2013).

Amy Adams in American Hustle

The sizzling actress is at the center of the film that is sweeping 2013's Academy Awards nominations. Amy Adams and Christian Bale lead the powerhouse cast, made up of of Jennifer Lawrence, Bradley Cooper and Jeremy Renner, responsible for one of the sexiest, most entertaining and visually rich films of that year. Adams seems to have a knack for attaching her name to Oscar-worthy films as she also plays a supporting role in Spike Jonze's Her (2013), which was up for four awards.